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A new study focusing on areas away from the center of the galaxy group Abell 2261 has raised hopes that there will soon be clues to an enigmatic black hole that has so far slipped through astronomers’ nets.
While it is known that our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a black hole as large as four million suns lurking in its center, the giant galaxy would be at the heart of the cluster Abell 2261, which is about 2.7 billion light-years away. from Earth, had to be an even larger one – an enormous object with a super-strong gravity with a mass equal to as much as 3 billion to 100 billion suns, astronomers assume based on the approximate mass of the galaxy. A new study by a team led by Kayhan Gultekin of the University of Michigan has been accepted for publication in a journal of the American Astronomical Society.
The previously unheard of monster has eluded cameras so far: researchers have previously tried to examine X-rays coming from the center of the galaxy to see the hidden black hole, but to no avail.
The new study conducted a more in-depth search for the galaxy using observations made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2018, including the zones tilted from the central part of the galaxy. on the assumption that the long-sought black hole can be moved to the side after a powerful fusion.
When black holes and other giant space objects collide, they send ripples into space-time, known as gravitational waves. Scientists argue that if the radiated waves are not all symmetrical, they could push the combined supermassive black hole away from the center of the extended galaxy, in a process known as ‘recoil’.
Such extruded black holes have so far been purely hypothetical and have never been detected by telescopes, unlike smaller black holes.
“It is not known whether supermassive black holes even come close enough to produce gravitational waves and merge; so far, astronomers have only confirmed the fusion of much smaller black holes,” NASA officials said in a statement on the new study written. and added that detecting this “would help scientists use and evolve observatories to search for gravitational waves by fusing supermassive black holes”.
The research team has now discovered that the densest concentrations of hot gas were from the heart of the galaxy, but the Chandra data could not map their location – not even for the time being. The researchers are currently pinning their hopes on Hubble’s successor – NASA’s latest large James Webb space telescope, which will go into space in October 2021.